Well-Preserved Splendor

The small wood case rests on a hallway table. Inside is an iodine-hued daguerreotype of a somber young man, along with a lock of his hair, tied with a purple mourning ribbon, that has accompanied the likeness for more than a century.

Nearby, a faded note addressed to ``Miss Eliza,'' framed between two pieces of glass, whispers the story of the young man, whose name was Ivy, and his fiancee, who was never to become his bride.

``Accept this ring as a token of my long-cherished friendship and love for you,'' the letter begins, its misspellings proof of the writer's youth. ``Ware it as a gird of the heart of him who presented it . . . As it encircles your finger so may our engagement encircle all of our future happiness . . . And in after days should we be separated let it be worn as a relic of the one that is gone.''

Rosemarie Pucci, the owner of this Sea Cliff house, knows the value of relics, and of the painstaking care involved in unearthing them. A history major with the precisely inquisitive manner of a schoolteacher, which she has been for decades, she once traveled to Italy for Etruscan digs.

Then she acquired a permanent archaeological site of her own -- this mustard-colored Victorian, veiled by century-old wisteria. Never sold in its 122-year existence, the house passed through the hands of four generations until it reached Pucci, who inherited it from an aunt.

In the attic of her new old home, Pucci found a rafters-high time capsule of century-old possessions. Slowly, as dust motes danced in the slants of sunlight, the house's newest mistress has made the tentative acquaintance of its first - the grown-up ``Miss Eliza,'' who never married the mysterious and romantic Ivy, but who, as Mrs. Eliza Jane Mc Cormack, is as vital a part of this house as the yellow-pine floors or the 14-foot ceilings.

``Eliza Jane loved peacocks,'' says Pucci, pointing out a framed picture of the regal bird on the stairway wall, and the peacock-patterned Czech plates in the kitchen's corner hutch. A tattered room divider, hand-stitched with the birds by Eliza Jane herself, is still stowed in the attic -- a fate not suffered by most of her preserved possessions. The cranberry-glass kerosene lamp that glows red in the hallway, the silk draperies separating the parlor and dining room, the cylinder desk in the library that for decades sheltered mice nests in its bottom drawer -- all first graced the house when Eliza Jane swept inside, past the etched-glass flowers on the front Palladian doors, her voluminous skirts swishing against the never-to-be-painted Gothic newel post.

The story of Eliza Jane Mc Cormack is in many ways the story of her house, and of the now sleepy village in which it stands. Perched on Hempstead Harbor, Sea Cliff was set ablaze in the late 1860s by the embers of the Civil War. Weary of blood-letting, Americans found religion in open-air tabernacles and campground revivals in places such as Sea Cliff. In 1875, the devoutly Protestant Mc Cormacks, who had left their native Kentucky for Manhattan at the war's end, built a gingerbread summer house on the village's eponymous cliffs, in the shade of a then-200-year-old oak tree that Rosemarie Pucci was forced to cut down a few years ago.

A decade after the house was built, the nation's religious fervor faded, along with the Mc Cormacks' fortunes. Reborn as a seaside resort, Sea Cliff was soon home to dozens of hotels and boarding houses. And so in the early 1880s, after the death of her husband, Joseph, the spunky Irish matron secured a $3,000 mortgage, added an east wing, and turned her home into The Monterey, a hotel that slept 22 guests.

Today, the house has been restored to look much as it did at the turn of the century, from its historic color scheme to its deceiving appearance - there are three stories in the front, five in the back. The two lower cliffside levels - one was a wash facility for bathers returning from the beach, the other a kitchen and dining room for guests -- are now rented apartments. And today the main house maintains a constant registry of three -- Pucci, her 82-year-old mother, Eleanor Pucci, and Monte, a German shepherd who is the house's namesake.

Rosemarie, a special-education teacher who politely demurs to give her age, did much of the renovation herself. Though she prefers late-18th-Century furnishings, with their sleek lines and dainty wood inlays, the house is done up in the heavier Renaissance Revival and Eastlake pieces fashionable in Eliza Jane's day. ``The house wants this,'' Pucci explains. ``It wouldn't be happy otherwise.''

Her additions to the original furnishings fit in seamlessly, from the artfully overlapped Persian rugs to the Aesthetic Movement music stand to the curvy sofa advertised in a Penny Saver ad from a ``fading Blanche DuBois type.''

``She made a mistake and advertised it as 96 inches long, so no one else looked at it,'' Pucci remembers. ``She had this in the corner, covered in plastic, with a special duster that she used just for it.''

Another southern lady of a bygone century would appreciate the lengths to which Pucci has gone to keep the spirit of the house intact. In the Etruscan-feeling main bathroom, she had a local carpenter build a mahogany shower stall and vanity using an 1878 Sears catalog as inspiration. In the guest bathroom, which houses an 1860s armoire brought up from the South by the Mc Cormacks, he crafted an enclosed shower that mirrors the heirloom exactly. The yellow kitchen, outfitted with cabinets built to match the originals from the cliffside kitchen, contains Rosemarie's only outright concession to modernity - a scrubbed-steel refrigerator.

``I wanted something,'' she explains, ``that says it's the 20th Century.''

A thoughtful archaeologist knows her purpose is not just to unearth relics of the past, but also to illuminate the lives of the people who left them behind. Pucci has yet to find a picture of the beautiful young Eliza Jane who so mesmerized Ivy, the dead young author of the poetic letter. His fate is lost, as is the signet ring he writes about.

But sitting in the same back-porch rockers where Eliza Jane's guests lazed and awaited the occasional harbor breeze, Rosemarie Pucci gets inspiration for her forays into the still-packed attic, where more answers surely await. With the house at her back, in her ``own treetop,'' she glimpses blue flashes of water.

``I think,'' she concludes, ``the ghosts are very happy.''